In emergency situations, such as terrorist attacks, natural or man-made disasters, etc., mobile communications networks can become overwhelmed with high volumes of user traffic. As a result, network resources may be unavailable for important personnel, such as public safety officials, government officials, etc. Because it is desirable for communications from such high priority users to be given precedence in emergency situations, the mobile communications network needs to provide a mechanism for prioritizing communications associated with these users.
Third generation and landline networks include mechanisms for prioritizing communications involving priority users. However, 4G LTE networks do not currently provide a suitable solution for prioritizing communications on an end-to-end basis for high priority users.
Existing proposals for prioritizing communications are typically on a per-interface basis. In addition, there is no standardized procedure for mapping a priority parameter on one interface to a priority parameter on another interface. Another problem associated with some message priority parameters is that a priority parameter can be located in an information element that is many levels deep in the message, requiring excessive parsing by the receiving node to determine the message priority.
In light of at least these difficulties, there exists a need for support for end-to-end priority service in LTE and subsequent generation networks.